


They Only Come Out at Night

by adreadfulidea



Category: Mad Men
Genre: F/M, Paranormal Romance, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:01:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: Michael Ginsberg's new roommate has a secret.





	

**ROOMMATE WANTED: VILLE-MARIE, MONTREAL.** Two bedroom walkup apartment just outside of downtown proper and a short metro ride to the McGill area. Ideal for University students. Free wifi and cable. Electricity will be split 50/50, all other utilities are paid for by the building. Apartment unit has unique features and is in a historic building (built 1868). No balcony, no pets allowed. The windows look out onto a graveyard - sorry, nothing I can do about that. Hope you don’t believe in ghosts. Rent is $650 a month. Please contact Michael Ginsberg at 514-278-5031.

 

 

The girl had sharp cheekbones and dark hair. That much he could tell, though she had a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face. Her eyes were somewhere between green and blue and they were very bright. Like someone had flicked a switch on inside. He was reminded of seeing cats at night in the alleyway, the way they were reduced to two spots of light attached to a lithe, quick moving shadow.

“You the applicant?” he asked, though he couldn’t imagine who else would be at his his door nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening.

She pulled the scarf down and gave him a wide, toothy smile. “Hi,” she said. “Megan Calvet, like I said on the phone.”

It had been raining all day, glueing yellow leaves to the sidewalk and drowning what was left of the flowerbeds out front. She took her boots off as soon as she came in. All Canadians did. It was cute.

“Sorry to stop by so late,” she said. “I had appointments I couldn’t avoid.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m a night owl myself. Come in and let me show you around the place.”

Once upon a time the building had been a brick-faced townhouse, pampered and shining with wealth. Next it was a boarding-house for young ladies run by a Catholic organization. That lasted until the swinging sixties, which exploded a lot of things but particularly the idea of living in gender-segregated spaces. It sat vacant until 1975, when someone converted it into four apartments, one for each floor. Ginsberg’s was the attic level, and the smallest.

“You really know your history,” she said, following him from room to room. “Is it an interest of yours?”

“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “I just like knowing things. When I was in New York every apartment I had was a clapboard box. It’s nice to be somewhere with a story behind it.”

“New York is very special to me,” she said. “I used to live there, actually. Have you been in Canada long?”

“For years,” he said. “I’m guessing you’re from Quebec?”

“Montreal, even,” she said. “But I haven’t been back for a very long time.”

 

 

She was a little bit strange. The list of problems with the apartment - sketchy hot water availability, a draft in the winter, weird noises in the middle of the night from the house settling - didn’t faze her at all. She only smiled gently at him, like she’d been expecting him to say that. He couldn’t have afforded the place if it was in tip-top shape; maybe she’d known that somehow.

He flipped up the shade on the window so she could see the graveyard next door. “And here you can meet our neighbor, Caspar. Quiet guy.”

She put a hand on the glass and looked out without speaking. He noticed she didn’t blink very much, her black lashes stark against her pale skin.

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

Megan touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. She appeared lost in thought. “No,” she said, eventually. “I think it’s beautiful.”

So she was a little bit strange. But so was he.

 

 

Megan brought a lot of furniture with her when she moved in. He didn’t have much, but somehow he never got around to getting more. He hadn’t noticed how empty the place looked until she started to fill it: a new couch (blue and white, striped), a picture of giant red-orange poppies to go above on the wall, a television that actually worked and an-old fashioned brass bed for her room.

He was surprised by the bed; everything else was so modern. “Sometimes you find what works,” she said with a shrug, “and you stick with it.”

Her curtains were made of a dark, heavy fabric. She always kept them closed.

 

 

The cemetery across the street was older than the house. There was no caretaker, no families stopping by to leave a loved one flowers. What headstones were left standing jutted out of the rolling land at odd angles. They were cracked and discolored from decades with no tending and the grass almost reached his knees. Here and there he found a broken beer bottle; remnants of partying teenagers who came by to tell ghost stories and play truth or dare - especially on Halloween. They thought it was haunted.

He wondered if only superstition kept the city from selling the land off. It wasn’t a historical site. Just a decrepit, forgotten boneyard. A lonely place. But he liked it; he liked the silence and the solemness. He could go for a walk without seeing another person the whole time. Or he usually could.

Megan came around a statue of an angel with her head down and her hands in her pockets. She was wearing a thin raincoat in spite of the cold, and it was unbuttoned. The sky was grey with clouds but otherwise undisturbed, another overcast day in a long line of them. “Oh,” she said when she saw him. “You come here, too?”

“Why not?” he said. “It’s convenient.”

“Atmospheric,” she said, grinning.

He shuffled his feet, cleared his throat. It was like he didn’t know how to talk to people anymore. If he ever had. “So,” he said, “you’re up early today.”

Megan slept late. Really late - she didn’t appear outside her room until at least six at night. Once the last bit of color had drained from the sunset she changed out of her pyjamas and left. Ginsberg assumed she had some kind of swing-shift job. Maybe in a bar; when she got home she sometimes had glitter in her hair or a stamp on her hand, the kind they did to identify customers who had already gotten past the door.

She didn’t get back until three or four in the morning. Then she would sit at the window and have a cigarette.

“Those’ll kill you,” Ginsberg said, the first time he observed her ritual. Not that he was watching her. He just didn’t have anything better to do.

“I doubt it,” she responded in a mild and pleasant way.

And she _was_ pleasant, which made his inability to respond all the more frustrating. What was wrong with him, that he couldn’t get to know a nice person?

Megan glanced up at the sky. She held her hand up to her eyes, miming blocking out sunshine. “Stay in bed and miss this beautiful afternoon? Not for the world. Want to join me?”

It was so unexpected that he didn’t know what to say. So he went still and stupid. Her face fell.

“Forget it,” she said. “I’m interrupting.”

“No,” he said, quickly. He shook his head. “I’m - it’s been awhile since I lived with anyone. I’m out of practice. Also I’m a rude asshole.”

That made her smile. Her teeth were very white. “You aren’t. Not really.”

“Just wait,” he said. “So. Where are we going?”

Megan fell into step beside him easily. “I thought just around the graveyard. Unless there was somewhere else -” She paused and peered into his face, very intent, like she was choosing her words carefully. Or like she expected him to finish the sentence. “- somewhere else you liked to go,” she said, when he didn’t.

“Here is fine,” he said.

It was kind of charming, once you forgot that there were dead people under your feet. The monuments were a mixed bunch, huge crosses placed next to tiny pauper’s graves that only contained a surname and a year. Some where in French, some in English, and he even saw a couple with Hebrew scrawled across the front. Ginsberg thought it must have served the whole neighborhood instead of a particular religion.

“Children used to play here,” said Megan.

“Did they?” Michael asked. “How do you know?” He half-expected to see an ancient child’s shoe or a doll lost in the grass.

“Oh, it was very common,” said Megan. “Back in the day. Graveyards weren’t scary places, or even all that solemn. And everyone was around death more. People wore mourning for a year.”

She stopped walking, the wind blowing her hair around, almost obscuring her profile. He noticed how her eyes kept drifting over to a small grave in the corner of the graveyard, one that was so covered in moss and dirt that he couldn’t tell what it said. The color of her irises was striking even under the pale light of an overcast sky; he thought, suddenly, about those red and yellow snakes whose patterns warned all the rest of nature that their venom packed a wallop.

Friend of yours, he wanted to say. But when he looked at the grave himself he got a weird feeling, almost disorienting, like he was trying to stand in two places at once. He had them, sometimes, dizzy spells that came and left without explanation. The sensation passed, the way it usually did.

Megan pulled her coat tighter around her, as though aware of the chill for the first time. “They got used to it,” she said.

 

 

Sometimes people just gave Megan things. Out of nowhere. Small gifts or favors, like getting her coffee while she was waiting in line at Starbucks or buying her a bracelet she’d been admiring through a shop window. She’d tell him about it later, her mouth twisting with embarrassment.

“Neat trick,” he said. “I wish someone would react that way to me.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

Once a girl followed her home on the metro. Right up to the building. Ginsberg wanted to call the cops but Megan wouldn’t let him. She closed the drapes and insisted the problem would take care of itself.

And it did. He saw through a crack in the curtains. The girl came to her senses an hour in; she shook herself all over, like she was coming out of a nightmare, before taking off at a run.

 

 

She brought guys home twice a week. Or mostly guys; there was the occasional girl in the mix. But always twice a week, exactly that, like she had a schedule for sex. Ginsberg stayed in his room those nights or sat out on the couch pretending to be deaf.

It was never the same person twice.

 

 

Megan approached him with a hopeful expression and a dvd under one arm. “Want to watch a movie?” she asked.

It was Saturday and not much was happening. She hadn’t gone anywhere, and he’d been having a bad day. It was those damn dizzy spells, or panic attacks or whatever they were; he’d spent most of the afternoon in bed, clammy and strange and not up to dealing with company. It was as though he had stumbled into a crack in the world, one only he could see - he knew it was his imagination, as overactive as it had always been. Nothing was right. Nothing was real. And that sense of wrongness followed him around, clinging like a bad perfume. He felt like someone was sitting on his chest.

When he’d emerged from his cocoon Megan was at the stove, making popcorn. She was wearing a blue bathrobe with house slippers, and looked very comfortable. The popcorn was the kind in foil that had to be heated on the burner.

“Don’t like the microwave stuff?” he asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “Even the salt tastes fake.”

Ginsberg went into the living room and couldn’t seem to settle down. He drifted towards the window, the one with the cemetery view. When he looked outside he had a knot of expectation in his belly but of course there was nothing to see. Some old stones and shadows. The popping in the background trailed off into silence; a hand on his shoulder made him jump. That was when she asked him about the movie.

“What is it?”

“ _The Sting_ ,” she said. “I like the classics.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that.”

“Is that a yes?” she asked. She touched his arm, very lightly. He nodded and she smiled. It had something like relief or gratitude in it, which he didn’t understand. “Great,” she said, enthusiastically, and went to get a blanket.

She sat down right next to him, their sides pressed together, and threw the blanket over both of them. Up close her skin was poreless, smooth as marble. She was an extremely pretty girl - even in a housecoat. Maybe especially then. But she had little smudges under her eyes, like she didn’t sleep enough. Something about the way her thin blue veins stood out at the juncture of her wrists made him feel protective of her.

“What?” she asked. “Is there popcorn on my face?”

“No,” he said, quickly, and turned towards the television screen. The Rockwell-style title card popped up, accompanied by an illustration that could have come from the Saturday Post. He hadn’t realized he was staring.

Megan placed the popcorn bowl in her lap. “I’m so glad you haven’t seen this one,” she said. “It has a real surprise ending.”

 

 

It became kind of a habit with them, watching movies together. “I won’t pretend I know what’s going on here,” Ginsberg said, one night when they were lying on a blanket in front of the television. Megan had pulled the cushions off the couch and put them on the floor, got pillows from the bedrooms. She made it very cozy. “Why’d she pull a gun on him? No one is behaving like a human being.”

The movie was _Jules et Jim_. Subtitled, because Ginsberg still couldn’t get through more than one sentence of French at a time.

“It’s New Wave,” said Megan. “It’s very symbolic, they don’t need to.”

“Symbolic of what?”

“The dissolution of the generation that experienced the first world war,” she said. “Or, I don’t know, the impossibility of men and women ever understanding one another. Woman as source of life. Woman as destroyer.”

“Are you screwing with me or is Truffaut?” he asked. “She’s just nuts. Whoever wrote the script knows less about women than I do.”

Megan laughed, her head lolling against his shoulder. She seemed to think he was pretty funny, which was new in his experience. And nice. He liked hearing her laugh. There was a sadness about her that he couldn’t understand. Megan was so likeable and social - why didn’t she have more friends?

“It isn’t social realism,” she said. “You have to be more forgiving. The movie was filmed in the sixties. Not a great decade, trust me.”

The image on the screen flickered and then blinked out into nothing. Above their heads the living room light did the same thing. Their plush nest fell into velvety black. They weren’t near enough to a streetlight for it to make much of a difference through the window.“Shit,” said Ginsberg. “Sorry. This place is so old. It does that, sometimes.”

“It’s okay,” said Megan. “I have some candles in my nightstand.”

She moved confidently in the darkness, like she could see right through it.

 

 

She was probably just lonely, he thought, laying on his bed one night when she had one of her men over. Why not? Everyone was lonely. He was himself. That was one of the reasons he’d been looking for a roommate to begin with. He’d gotten so tired of being alone, to the point that living with a stranger was preferable.

Megan’s door opened. “Let me help you,” she was saying, a note of despair in her voice. “François, _stop_ -”

The minute Ginsberg heard _stop_ he was on his feet, throwing open his bedroom door. It was an automatic response that bypassed his decision making capabilities entirely. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Megan, are you okay?”

She looked at him with wide, startled eyes. “Michael, go back inside.”

“Why?” he asked, but then he saw. Her friend was bleeding, a red stain on the side of his neck, seeping through the collar of his shirt. Thankfully not a big one, but it was still there, and it was inexplicable.

The guy seemed dazed, almost drugged. His clothes were rumpled and his hair a mess. He looked right past Ginsberg and started towards the door. Halfway there he stopped and clapped a hand over the wound. When his palm came away with blood on it he reacted like he had no idea how it had gotten there. “What - what just happened?”

Megan followed him. She was wearing a short silk nightgown that dipped low in the back. “Let me get you a bandage,” she begged. “I’ll call you a cab -”

“No,” François said. He was waking up now, stumbling into his shoes. “I’m getting the hell out of here.”

“I’m not trying to keep you,” she said. “You’re forgetting your coat - François, _wait_ -”

But he was gone, slamming out into the hallway without even closing the door behind him. She pushed it shut with a click. Ginsberg saw her bare spine curve as she leaned against the wood, hunching in on herself. Slowly, she straightened up and came back to him.

The coat was a nice one, double breasted grey wool. It was crumpled up on the bench where they sat to take off their shoes. François must have taken it off in a hurry when she invited him in.

“I’m going to echo his sentiment,” said Ginsberg. “Megan, what the fuck was that?”

She actually flinched, like her sense of shame was so great it was hurting her physically. “An accident,” she said, and crept back into her room. Chin down, eyes on the floor.

There were two small drops of blood on the neckline of her lingerie. They looked like rubies, or red pearls.

 

 

Ginsberg spent a lot of time in the cemetery over the next couple of days. He sat on one of the ancient stones and watched the lights in his building turn off and on.

What he was thinking wasn’t possible. He knew it wasn’t, and he kept thinking it anyway. He and Megan hadn’t spoken since he saw her fuckbuddy flee from their apartment. Which shouldn’t have mattered to him, or to her - they barely knew each other. Yet he thought he heard the sound of crying in her room as he passed by on his way out; another in a list of impossible things.

He stayed there until the late autumn sunset faded away and the stars came out. It had been clearer lately, less foggy and wet. Eventually - inevitably, it felt like - she sought him out.

“Hi,” she said, standing with her hands in her pockets. Her skin nearly glowed in the dark. “Can we talk?”

“No offense,” he replied, “but I’d rather not.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth.

All she did was nod. The funny thing was that her reaction disappointed him. As if he’d been hoping for a fight. An argument, a flurry of reasons why it was important that their friendship be repaired.

“Okay,” she said, and let him be. She was gone from the apartment by the time he gave up his brooding and returned home. It would be close to a week before he saw her again.

When he did, she was pounding on his bedroom window. The one that was four stories up from the ground.

 

 

It was mid-morning, and his bedroom was filled with light. He was cleaning it. Earlier he had tried to read - the book, one by Mordecai Richler, lay abandoned on his bedside table - but he couldn’t concentrate. The apartment was empty as a mausoleum and he remembered why he wanted someone else there.

(Where was she, he thought, and was she okay. Should he have called the police? What would he say if he did?)

So he cleaned. He rearranged the cans in the kitchen cabinets and mopped the floor. The lightbulbs in the bedrooms needed to be changed, so he did that too - which led to him stripping the sheets off the bed. Once he got started it was easier to keep going than to stop. He was sweeping when the motion of his broom knocked one of the baseboards loose.

There was something tucked behind it, pressed between the board and the wall. It was a slim red book, a diary, tied shut with a piece of frayed ribbon. There was a gold-lettered phrase in french on the front cover. He untied the ribbon and two photographs fell out.

The pictures were old. Very old - he guessed late Victorian by the dress the girl in one of them was wearing. She was in about her middle teens, the large hat she wore casting a shadow across her face. Two long, dark braids of hair hung down to her waist. She was touching a flower to her lips.

The second one was of a group of people lined up outside the apartment building. They were wearing uniforms - maids and footmen and what looked to be a horse trainer, judging by his boots. It must have been taken back when the place was one big house. He couldn’t make any individual features out, just a general impression of everyone standing very still and squinting.

He opened the book to a random page. _The day of our escape grows closer_ , it read. _But her parents are watching us more closely than ever -_

Something slammed against the window. He dropped the book.

Ginsberg would have expected a bird to have run into the glass. Maybe, in an extreme case, someone throwing a rock.

It was Megan, crouched precariously on the windowsill outside. And she looked _terrible_.

Her hair was wild around her exhausted, chalky face, and her beautiful eyes were rimmed with red. But worst of all were the bruises. She was peppered with them, spreading ugly and grey-blue down her limbs and across her collarbones. There was a spot of dried blood underneath her nose.

“Please,” she said, and put her palm flat to the glass.

He ran to the window and pulled it open. She fell inside with a gasp and he caught her before she hit the ground.

“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. She was shaking like a leaf, like she was freezing to death. “I’m sorry -”

“Shhh,” Ginsberg said. He wrapped his arms around her for whatever comfort it would give. “Tell me what happened. Megan, who did this to you?”

“Nobody,” she said. “I got caught out in the sunlight. I lost track of time. Michael, close the curtains. Close the curtains, please. It _hurts_.”

He let her go just long enough to yank them closed. “What can I do?” he asked as he helped her to the bed. Everything he’d ever read - every horror movie he had ever seen - suggested that she should feel cold to the touch. She was as warm as anybody. Normal. Human. There were goosebumps on her arms. “Do you need -”

“What?”

“Blood,” he said. It made him sick, but he pressed on. “I could give you -”

“ _No_ ,” she said, and pushed away from him. “No, you can’t.”

“Then what,” he asked, “what can I do?”

Megan fell back against the pillows and winced. Stiffly, she moved her limbs as if testing their flexibility - bending an elbow, raising her knee. The bruises were less livid in the darkened room. “A warm bath helps. Believe it or not. God, I want out of these clothes.”

“Coming up,” he said. On the way he ducked into her bedroom to grab bath supplies from her nightstand; their bathroom cabinet was small enough that she found it more convenient to carry everything around in a shower caddy.

The bottles were there, one of oil and one bubblebath. Rosewater scented. He took them both just in case.

From the back of the shelf he spotted a glimmer of metal. On some level he knew what it would be before he reached for it, unwrapping the handkerchief that kept the sharp edge from cutting the unwary.

A scalpel. Honed to medical precision. He put it back, tucked inside embroidered cotton.

The tub was an old claw footed monstrosity, original to the house. The pipes shrieked when he turned the taps, but at least the hot water was functioning. He put too much bubble bath in and added oil on top of that. It exploded into froth. Well, maybe that was how she liked her baths.

He brought her inside, leaving heavily against his arm. She smiled when she saw pinkish foam dripping over the tub edge. “Thank you.”

Some of the discoloration around her eyes was smeared makeup, he noticed. What the hell had she been up to?

“Hope I got the water temperature right,” he said. He knew he should leave, but she still wasn’t steady on her feet -

“Turn around,” she said, delicately.

“Oh,” he said. “Uh, right.” He shuffled awkwardly and waited as clothes hit the ground.

There was a splash, and a smell of roses. She sighed.

“Good?”

“Good,” she said. “You can look, now.”

The ends of her hair were wet and the heat of the water was warming her skin to a healthier tone. She had washed her face off while his back was turned and no longer looked quite so dire. More tired than anything. The bubbles covered whatever needed to be covered.

“I’ll get you a bathrobe,” he said. Her robe was hanging on the back of her door. The lapels were edged in white lace, charmingly old-fashioned. He folded it and left it on the back of the toilet where she could reach it without getting up. She was neck deep in the bath, her eyes half-closed.

“I could fall asleep right here,” she said.

“So you do sleep.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And I’m also not afraid of crosses or garlic. Want a list of my weaknesses?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it would help me much. I mean, you can fly.”

“What, the window?” She shook her head. “I climbed. I can’t fly. I move fast, though.”

He got the washcloth off the towel rack and handed it over. There was a spot of soap on her cheek. “How long before you recover?”

“A few days,” she said. “I haven’t been this stupid in years.” She tilted her head back, soaking the rest of her hair. It went slightly wavy and stuck to the sides of her face.

“Yell if you need help getting out,” he said. “I promise I’ll keep my eyes to myself.”

She was in the bathroom for twenty minutes before she called his name. He found her sitting on the toilet, legs and arms crossed, her robe on. Her hair was combed and slicked back. “Do you have any other questions?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Why do you have a scalpel?”

Megan blinked at him. “That’s all?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What do you need it for?”

“Because vampires don’t actually have fangs,” she said.

He brought her back to his room. They should have gone to hers, but he wasn’t thinking. Megan was unbothered by his mistake. “This is fine,” she said, and climbed into his bed with her robe still tied around her. “Did you clean in here?”

“I was bored,” he said.

She smiled up at him. The raw honestly of her face was striking, wiped free of makeup - the edges of her cheekbones, her square jaw, her wide mouth. He felt like he was seeing her for the first time. “Lie down,” she said. “I don’t want to put you out.”

There was a perfectly good bed in the other room and a serviceable couch available free of charge. He had excuses if he wanted to make them. Her hand was on his wrist; he let her tug him down.

He woke only once, when she was getting back in bed. “Had to go to the ladies,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

He did. It wasn’t until the next morning that he remembered the book on the floor. He looked past Megan’s slumbering form (her bathrobe still, miraculously, in place; her chest not rising or falling at all) to find that it was gone.

 

 

“I can’t believe you don’t want to know more about it,” Megan said. They were sitting on the back steps, watching a raccoon gleefully dig through the trash. He must have found something good because he started stuffing his face, occasionally casting a look of greed and possession back at them. “Most people would.”

The bruises were almost gone, reduced to faint bluish smudges. She’d slept a lot the past few days.

“They’d be asking how it happened,” she continued. “Or how old I was. Or how I often I needed to feed.”

“And here I was thinking asking a lady about her age was rude,” Ginsberg said. “Or making comments about her diet.”

Megan raised her eyebrows. “That’s one way to put it,” she said. “But aren’t you curious?”

Ginsberg shrugged. He _was_ curious, in truth, but not in a way that had to be immediately satisfied. She had done him the favor of treating him like a human being - the first person he could remember doing so in ages. Maybe ever. He could do the same for her. Megan would tell him what she wanted to tell him.

The world was a stranger place than he had ever known. There was a vampire beside him, and he didn’t believe he was in danger.

“Blood makes me queasy,” he said. “Besides which, I figured they couldn’t be very good memories for you. How you were - um, turned, or whatever it’s called.”

“They aren’t,” she said. The side of her hand bumped up against his; when he didn’t move she wrapped her fingers around his. They stayed like that for a second.

Ginsberg licked his lips. His chest felt tight, the way it sometimes did before he had his episodes. “Megan?”

“Yes?”

“Are ghosts real?”

She searched his face, her own looking like something big was building behind it. Like she was waiting for a magic word. “Why are you asking? Do you want there to be?”

“It’s just that sometimes I feel like our place is haunted,” he said. He’d taken his room apart looking for the missing book. It wasn’t there, and he knew he hadn’t moved it. He couldn’t imagine that Megan would have. She had no motive to commit that particular crime.

“By ghosts?” she asked. “Or by memories?”

He stared at her. How did she guess -

And then he felt it, a sensation of everything sliding sideways, or flipping upside down. The alley became bright-bordered and confusing, day and night all at once, a double-exposed photograph. The chain link fence was there and not; a low wooden building beyond it seemed to lean in close and fade away simultaneously. He thought he heard laughter, the sound of bells jingling.

“I know you,” he said, abruptly. “I knew you before.”

She squeezed his hand, tight. “Michael -”

Just as quickly as it had arrived his certainty left him. The alley was strewn with everyday garbage and dead leaves again. Megan was his new roommate and friend. There was no before. There had never _been_ a before, nothing that he could grasp at or prove. His past was as slippery as an eel.

Ginsberg pulled away. “I’m don’t know why I said that.” He burned with humiliation, all over his body. “I just - I have these memory issues, sometimes -”

“Amnesia?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He knew that he was from New York, and that he’d spent his childhood in a tenement filled with noise and the smell of the neighbor’s cooking. He knew that he’d moved to Montreal after that. But he didn’t know much else.

“Michael, it’s okay,” she said. “We’ll go back inside. You’ll feel better soon.”

“Will I?” he asked, halfway to panic. He was so fed up with being this way. But he let her place her hand on his back and lead him, let her put him to bed like he had done for her.

 

 

The next night she came into his room. He was lying on top of the covers, reading. She slipped through the door quiet as a daydream and he didn’t know she was there until her shadow fell across his bed. That was another thing he hadn’t noticed - how little sound she made when she walked.

She was just getting up and wore a long pyjama shirt that buttoned up the front. There were no bruises left that he could see. “Hey,” he said. “You look great. Feeling better?”

“Back to normal,” she said. “If you can call anything about me normal.” The smile she gave him was ironic, and she brushed her hair back in a clearly nervous gesture. “How about you?”

“I took it easy today,” he said. “There were no - recurrences. So are you gonna, uh, go out tonight?”

“No,” she said. “I can last a while yet. I was wondering if you wanted to -”

“Have a movie night?” he asked, and started to rise from the bed. “Sounds good to me. I’m picking, though.”

Megan put her hand on his chest and pushed him back down with barely an effort. It made him wonder how strong she was, and that made his ears go red. “Not a movie night,” she said.

“No?”

“No,” she said, and kissed him.

 

 

(He should have turned her down. That would have been sensible. But it had been so long since - had he _ever_ -)

 

 

He knew without asking how to touch her. That she liked having her breasts sucked and then bitten before he did anything else, that there was a spot on her hip that made her leg twitch; how to put his mouth between her legs and make her arch her back.

Her nails scrabbled at his scalp the first time she came. She was drunk with pleasure, almost slurring her words. He wanted to hear her sound like that again, and kept going until his jaw ached and she was drumming her heels against his shoulders.

“Oh Jesus, Jesus _Christ_ ,” she whined, high and frantic. Her hands were buried in his hair.

He had to touch himself. Had to, he was going crazy - he slid his hand into his shorts and groaned with his mouth still on her.

“Stop,” she ordered, and in the blink of an eye - literally - she had him rolled over so she was on top. He hadn’t even seen her _move_. “Wait for me, you bastard.” Her hair fell in messy, just-fucked waves and her eyes gleamed. She had never looked less human or more gorgeous. Feral. Predatory.

And he wasn’t scared. Courage pumped through him with every beat of his heart. He wanted to know what her teeth would feel like on his neck.

“Make me,” he said, and she slammed his body down and had her wicked way with him.

 

 

“I didn’t think I could have this,” she said, sprawled across him afterwards. “That I’d missed my chance.” He didn’t ask what she meant, but he found out soon enough.

 

 

“Why do you eat?” he asked, watching Megan slice ginger and add it to some chicken dish she was making. “Do you need to?” Now that they were together he felt more comfortable asking her rude questions. It was silly to hold off - he’d been _inside_ of her. How could any question cross a boundary after that? She didn’t mind, as far as he could tell.

“No,” she said. “But I like to. The flavors are stronger now. It’s for pleasure.”

“But not for hunger,” Ginsberg said.

“Vampires are always hungry,” she said. “A little, or a lot. Only blood will scratch that itch - and not pig or cow blood. Believe me, I’ve tried. So I try to - reduce harm, I guess you would call it. Not hurt anyone more than I absolutely have to.”

“Makes sense,” he said. “Can you turn into a bat?”

“I wish,” she said. “Or a wolf, or mist. Bram Stoker made all that up.” She slid her dish in the oven, straightened up and grinned at him. “Let me know if you get the urge to chow down on any bugs.”

“Only the small ones so far,” he said. “Flies. Mosquitoes. Spiders have too many legs.”

She leaned in to kiss him. But when she put her hand - still in an oven mitt - on the center of his chest, he felt himself sliding sideways, into something or _somewhere_ else.

It was cold, and it was raining. There was mud seeping through the back of his jacket. He was supposed to keep the jacket clean; it was part of a uniform. His chest hurt too bad for him to care. And he couldn’t breathe - he couldn’t -

They had lost everything, he thought, before the darkness overtook him.

 

 

He awoke to Megan having hysterics.

“Michael,” she was saying, “Michael, _please_ be okay, look at me -” Her fingers were balled up in the front of his shirt.

He was lying flat on the kitchen linoleum. The room turned gently in circles until it didn’t and Megan’s face swam back into focus.

“Miss Blankenship is going to have my guts for garters,” he said. “She hates when I rumple my uniform.”

Megan drew back. She was very pale, even for her. “What?”

But the images he had in his head were already fading. When he tried to access them he found he had gone totally blank. Who the hell was Miss Blankenship? When had he ever worn a uniform?

He felt like he had been submerged in ice water. His clothes should have been wet, except - there was no rain. He was home, and he was safe.

“I think there might be something really wrong with me,” he said.

“There isn’t,” she said, and sat back against the fridge with her arms wrapped around her knees. “It’s me, Michael. It’s because I came back.”

Ginsberg struggled upwards. His limbs didn’t want to take orders from his brain. “What are you talking about?” he asked, once he got himself propped up on his elbows. “How can you come back if you were never here before?”

“You don’t remember any of it, do you?”

“No,” he said, unsure if he was saying he didn’t remember, or that there was _nothing_ to remember.

“I have something that might help,” she said, and left in the direction of her bedroom. Every minute that passed was like the ticking of a bomb. He wanted to hide in his room, to pretend nothing had happened. That everything was normal. That _he_ was normal.

She came back with the book, the one he found behind the baseboard.

“Why did you take it?” he asked.

“Because I was afraid of what would happen if you read it,” she said. “I’d only just gotten you back - but that’s no excuse.” She took out the pictures and showed him the one of the girl. “Recognize her?”

“No,” he said. And if it sounded like a lie, then maybe it was; he looked at the picture again, at the familiar tilt of the girl’s chin -

“That’s me, Michael,” she said. “I’m about sixteen years old here. I gave this to you.” She held the other photograph up and tapped her finger against a figure on the very end. “And there you are. You worked for my family.”

“How can I have worked for your family?” he asked. “I’m not the immortal one in this conversation. This is crazy, Megan.”

She shut her eyes in a spasm of some emotional pain. “I know you aren’t immortal. We were going to run away together, but my mother found out and locked me in my room -”

“She locked you in? What if there was a fire?”

“Michael, focus. That isn’t the point. Really think about what I’m saying. Does any of it ring a bell?”

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “What’re you trying to tell me?”

She looked at him with desperation. “Do you trust me?”

“What -”

“Do you _trust_ me.”

“Yes,” he said. “I trust you. God help me, but I do.”

Megan extended her hand. “Then come outside. There’s something you need to see.”

He knew where they were going before they got there. The graveyard was especially spooky tonight, a series of black silhouettes looming out of the mist. Leaves crunched under Megan’s feet as they crossed the damp earth. There was a faint trace of snow in the air, but it wasn’t falling yet.

She took him to the far corner. The headstone she had been preoccupied with on their first walk through.

He let go of her hand and she knelt down. She scrubbed at the surface of the stone with the edge of her nightgown, clearing away the accumulation of moss and dirt that had built up over the years. “Look,” she said. “Look - do you understand?”

Ginsberg looked down at the newly revealed name. He had gone numb. “This isn’t possible.”

“Being a vampire isn’t possible,” she said. “Finding you again wasn’t possible. A lot of things aren’t possible. That doesn’t stop them from happening.”

The ‘M’ was almost worn through, but the rest of the letters were clear. M-I-C-H-A-E-L-G-I-N-S-B-E-R-G. All in evenly spaced capitals. Just like that.

He turned his hands over, staring at his knuckles, the lines in his palms. They were as solid as they had always been.

“How can I be dead?” he asked. “I touch you. I _feel_ it.”

“Because I’m dead, too,” she said. “When was the last time you interacted with someone besides me? Ate a meal? Went anywhere but our apartment building or this graveyard? It’s because you’re buried here, Michael. I’m sorry, but I’m telling the truth.”

He sat down, heavily. Or as heavily as a ghost could.

“I think you’re a poltergeist, technically,” she said. “Because you can affect the physical world.”

“How edifying,” he said.

“I’m not sure how you managed to place that ad,” she said. “But it sure started being talked about when respondents would phone only to hear static on the line. Or stop by and have the door open on its own. You scared the shit out of some college kids, honey.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. He’d wanted company. That was all.

She crawled over and sat next him. There were spots of dirt on her knees. He knew, now, that when he got up there would be none on him. “I wanted to tell you in a better way. But you started having these flashbacks -”

“They got worse,” he said. “Once you came back.”

“I thought it was going to just be a stupid rumor,” she said. “That the apartment had leaky pipes and your neighbors a case of mass hysteria. But there you were. I couldn’t believe my good luck. And you had no idea who I was.”

He asked her the one question he’d promised himself he would stay away from. He hadn’t wanted to upset her. He still didn’t. “Megan? How did you become a vampire?”

“I was going to climb out my window,” she said. “That night my mother locked me in. There was a trellis outside, against the wall. I’d done it before. You went to get a horse cart. But it was raining. Thunder and lightning, wet ground. The horse spooked, started to run -”

“I fell,” he said. “I fell under it.” The taste of pennies welled up in the back of his throat. Rain and blood in his mouth.

“Under the wheel,” she said. “I saw everything. And then I never saw you again. I wasn’t allowed to go the funeral.”

“How did you stand it?” he asked. “I couldn’t have.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “You know in some traditions suicides become vampires? I suppose it’s appropriate. I _am_ Catholic. It’s no secret how they feel about self-annihilation.”

He rested his head on her shoulder. She ran her fingers through his hair.

“I thought I was being punished,” she said. “That I would have to live forever without you.”

“You won’t,” he said. Promised, with his hand in hers. He would be there for her if someone burned the house to the ground. They’d move into the cemetery if they had to. “Not ever again.”

She laughed with tears in her eyes. They reflected the streetlight above, going shiny and yellow for a minute. Her teeth, a brief flash of bone-white, pressed into her lower lip. “Not what you’d call a conventional happy ending.”

“I wouldn’t call it an ending,” he said. “I’d call it a beginning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A TWIST ENDING. That everyone saw coming. Couldn't warn for major character death because then I'd give the whole game away.
> 
> The title comes from The Edgar Winter Group album of the same name. Happy Halloween!


End file.
